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Vinaigrette, Sauce a La
This is a sauce much used in Paris for cold viands. Sauce a la vinaigrette is composed of salad oil, vinegar, finely-chopped parsley, and shallots, onions, or chives, with pepper and salt to taste. For those who have no objection to oil this sauce is infinitely superior to mere vinegar, pepper, and salt. It is suitable for every kind of cold meat, and especially for cold calf's head; and is admirable with cold salmon, turbot, or, indeed, any sort of cold fish. Hardboiled eggs also eat extremely well with sauce a la vinaigrette; so do many kinds of cold vegetables, and especially asparagus; in fact, this is quite as often eaten cold as hot in Paris, and always a la vinaigrette. Cold artichokes are also very largely consumed with this sauce. When used for cold meat, and particularly with calf's head, the addition of a few capers to the sauce is a great improvement; and with cold roast meat a gherkin cut up fine is excellent. As this is a sauce produced almost entirely out of the cruet-stand, it suits well with our English habits. You rub up the salt and pepper with a little vinegar, then add as much oil as you please, with chopped parsley, shallot, gherkins, or capers, according to convenience or taste.
No quantities are given, which is deliberate — this is a cruet-stand sauce, mixed to taste. A few points make it repeatable.
- ProportionsNo quantities are given. Modern practice is roughly three parts oil to one part vinegar; start at 3:1 with 6 tbsp oil and 2 tbsp wine vinegar, which dresses enough cold meat or fish for four, and add vinegar from there if you want it sharper.
- "Salad oil"In this period the phrase generally means olive oil. It is unlikely to have been as assertive as the strongly flavoured green oils sold now, so a gentle extra-virgin, or a neutral oil cut with a little olive oil, is probably closer to the intended effect.
- The hinge: dissolve the salt firstRubbing the salt and pepper into the vinegar before the oil goes in is the whole technique. Salt will not dissolve in oil, and undissolved crystals leave the sauce gritty and flat-tasting.
- Shallots and onionChop them very fine and, if the sauce will sit more than an hour, rinse them briefly in cold water or steep them in the vinegar for ten minutes. Raw shallot left in oil turns harsh and sulphurous.
- Capers and gherkinsBoth come packed in brine or vinegar; drain and blot them, or they will thin the sauce and push it sour. Chop rather than leave whole so they distribute.
- Calf's headThe dish the sauce is repeatedly attached to here is now rare in English-speaking kitchens. The same sauce is at its best on the other foods listed: cold salmon or turbot, hard-boiled eggs, cooked asparagus, artichokes, cold roast meat.
- KeepingIt separates within minutes because there is no emulsifier. Mix it in a jar and shake again just before serving rather than trying to hold it together; a teaspoon of mustard will stabilise it, though the original does not call for any.
Vinaigrette is simply the diminutive of vinaigre, vinegar — itself vin aigre, sour wine — and the word described the sauce long before it described a bottled salad dressing. Cassell's frames it as a Parisian habit being recommended to English readers, and the aside that it "suits well with our English habits" because it comes "almost entirely out of the cruet-stand" is the real argument: the Victorian dining table already carried oil, vinegar, salt and pepper in a stand, so the sauce required no stock, no roux and no time at the range. That mattered in a period when the alternative dressing for cold meat was often vinegar alone, and when English suspicion of olive oil at table was still common enough that the book has to concede the point to "those who have no objection to oil." The note that Parisians eat asparagus cold as often as hot is a fair observation of French practice, where cold cooked vegetables dressed in vinaigrette were, and remain, standard first-course fare.